Uncollected Stories

A miscellaneous collection of short stories gathered mostly from the author's later life. Some good writing, of course, as expected, but few of these made a particularly strong impression. Several good pieces of humour, in particular The Parish Magazine and The Story of Spedegue's Dropper, though the cricketing theme of the latter doesn't interest me. The Nightmare Room was my favourite story, a seemingly shocking piece, with a bathetic ending. Rather a lot of typos, especially in the First World War story The Death Voyage.

Iin 1982, Doubleday released an edition of Arthur Conan Doyle short stories collected by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green as The Unknown Conan Doyle: Collected Stories. These thirty-three pieces are a hodgepodge of Conan Doyle's writings, with the majority of them dating from the early years of his career. Some of them have been collected since in other compilation volumes, but others of them I read for the first time here. They range widely in tone, topic and genre, which makes this volume a good one for dipping into when in need of a quick Conan Doyle fix.

The stories are preceded by a lengthy introduction by the editors which provides the publication history of each (sometimes quite complicated) with additional show more commentary.

There's a little something for everyone here, from tales of the dusty outback to very funny satires, cases of mistaken identity, and counterfactual histories.

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